Ken Dixon: Yo, check it out, your future's coming

Updated 12:05 pm, Monday, May 6, 2013

Hey, young people! Hello!

Can I divert attention from your "social-networking" gizmos for a couple minutes to contemplate the future beyond peer chatter and the tens of thousands of dollars in college debt you're either saddled with or will accumulate by the time you're pushed out into the "real world"?

And you high schoolers, especially urban kids whose parents might not have the wherewithal to pay for even part of your higher education, consider the next 10, 20, 40 years.

It's coming at you like a slow-moving train. You don't want to be tied down to the tracks like the "Perils of Pauline," right?

First of all, remember that Abraham Lincoln did not go to college. He worked, read books and eventually became an attorney, lawmaker and dead president. Granted, he grew up in the woods and knew nothing about the couplets of rap; didn't have to navigate the brutal halls of a tough high school, or grapple with peer pressure that frowns on people who actually care about learning.

If in the realm of possibility you don't know who Honest Abe was, look him up on Wikipedia, then come back here. We'll wait. In fact, look up the "Perils of Pauline" movies, too, while you're at it.

So yeah, now it's obviously more complicated to break through to adulthood than it was 160, 170 years ago.

Between school, working and teenage angst exemplified by those text-spitting gizmos, a young person's life can get pretty complicated.

And guess what? Very few people care that you're distracted from what's going on in the adult world around you. In fact, the less threat you present to the status quo, the less you're able to think critically and ask questions, the better for the power elite who run the country and manipulate your desire for the vacuous trappings of conspicuous consumerism with claptrap TV advertising and political attack ads.

But it has never been more important to understand how things work in the greater -- or lesser -- world of adults. A budget cut in Hartford could mean your state university may cost more next semester, or your high school lays off your favorite teacher next September.

Another military intervention in a country you never heard of could mean that if your economic circumstances channel you into military service, you could end up dying for reasons of which you might not be fully aware.

Forty years ago the Vietnam War was raging, eventually killing 58,000 American service personnel. But there I was, at age 15, 16, oblivious to the possibility of the draft, the jungle and a violent death. Fortunately, the people a few years older, who protested the war -- and the American news media, who brought back the ugly pictures and stories of the losing conflict -- turned the tide of public sentiment. President Richard Nixon stopped the draft shortly after I got out of high school and by April 1975, we had decamped from Southeast Asia.

So what's the point? The point is that Social Studies, Civics and History have never been more important for today's students.

Sure, it's good to emphasize science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM quartet. That's where Connecticut hopes the good-paying 21st century jobs will develop, because you can't make enough French fries or stock enough shelves at Walmart, at the minimum wage, to make the kind of money needed to reach the middle class and pay the income taxes the state needs to stay afloat.

"I'm very concerned, to be honest, that the social studies is being squeezed out of the curriculum," Merrill told the board and state Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor.

"I think it's something that's been an issue for a long time," she said. "I think it's more a case of benign neglect than anything. When you test for things, people pay attention to them. There's no test for things like civics, government and history. I happen to think citizenship skills are one of the more important skills that we educate for in public education. It's a long-held believe by people as prominent as Thomas Jefferson. It's really the reason we educate people to begin with. I think it's a national problem, not just a state problem. What I'm seeing is a generation that doesn't understand the duties of citizenship and the course of our history the way that we did."

Take some time out to look up Tom Jefferson on Wiki. Pull a nickel out of your pocket and say howdy to him, too.

While you did that, I looked up the voter turnout for last November's election in Connecticut. It was a mediocre 74 percent statewide, but a dismal 52 percent in Bridgeport; 79 percent in Danbury; 82 percent in Greenwich; and 72 percent in Stamford.

"Social studies is the place where our students learn how to become members of our society and it is the best hope for our future and for theirs," Tulley told the ed board. "In a world without the social studies nobody would even know what questions to ask of ourselves and of our world."

Pryor agreed that history, civics and social studies should get more emphasis.

"We believe that such knowledge is essential to the full development of our students," he said. "The reality is there has been a phenomenon, intentional or unintentional, of narrowing the curriculum and focusing in too laser-like a fashion on literacy and numeracy without acknowledging that the broader development of students' academic knowledge is essential and without recognizing the common core itself demands that kind of understanding of the range of disciplines."

The future's coming at you, folks, but you can still make preparations. Start with looking up from your social-network gizmo, turn to the front page of this newspaper and start asking questions that start with the word "why."